True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson

By Kostya Kennedy

Winner of the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year

True is a probing, richly-detailed, unique biography of Jackie Robinson, one of baseball's—and America's—most significant figures.

For players, fans, managers, and executives, Jackie Robinson remains baseball’s singular figure, the person who most profoundly extended, and continues to extend, the reach of the game. Beyond Ruth. Beyond Clemente. Beyond Aaron. Beyond the heroes of today. Now, a half-century since Robinson’s death, letters come to his widow, Rachel, by the score. But Robinson’s impact extended far beyond baseball: he opened the door for Black Americans to participate in other sports, and was a national figure who spoke and wrote eloquently about inequality.

True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson by Kostya Kennedy is an unconventional biography, focusing on four transformative years in Robinson's athletic and public life: 1946, his first year playing in the essentially all-white minor leagues for the Montreal Royals; 1949, when he won the Most Valuable Player Award in his third season as a Brooklyn Dodger; 1956, his final season in major league baseball, when he played valiantly despite his increasing health struggles; and 1972, the year of his untimely death. Through it all, Robinson remained true to the effort and the mission, true to his convictions and contradictions.

Kennedy examines each of these years through details not reported in previous biographies, bringing them to life in vivid prose and through interviews with fans and players who witnessed his impact, as well as with Robinson's surviving family. These four crucial years offer a unique vision of Robinson as a player, a father and husband, and a civil rights hero—a new window on a complex man, tied to the 50th anniversary of his passing and the 75th anniversary of his professional baseball debut.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781250274052

Kostya Kennedy

KOSTYA KENNEDY is an editorial director at Dotdash Meredith and a former senior writer at Sports Illustrated. He is the New York Times bestselling author of 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (runner-up for the 2012 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing) and Pete Rose: An American Dilemma. Both won the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year. He has taught at Columbia and NYU, and lives with his wife and daughters in Westchester County, New York.

Book preview

PART ONE

SPRING

1946

STANCE

Back then, over the years of his career and after he retired, certain attention was paid to the way Jackie Robinson stood at the plate. His stance. He held his hands high, though not extravagantly so, and he gripped his bat all the way down at the end of its handle, his left pinkie wrapped loosely around the knob. He would wag the bat—34 inches, 35 ounces, of blond ash turned by hand in Louisville, Kentucky—straight up and down, a short range of motion on either side of a 45-degree angle to the earth. Robinson kept his arms back and away from his body, as if, perhaps, he were about to squeeze something waterlogged that might drip on him. He did not waggle his fingers or work his palms on the wood. His grip was firm and constant. He was a right-handed batter, and extremely dangerous.

Robinson kept his hips and backside taut and motionless when he was up at the plate, his left side turned just outward toward third base. He did not bend his knees, at least not to any measure perceptible to those watching him, nor did he crouch forward above the belt. He stood straight, and from instep to shoulder there emerged, as he settled in, a strong feeling of the implacable. Robinson was not quite rigid at the plate—there was too much warm flesh, too much life coursing through him for that. But he was solid standing there, exceptionally solid, and not likely to be moved. A sculpted pillar. Even in his first years of professional ball, at ages twenty-seven, twenty-eight, Robinson was thicker than you might have thought, a football player’s cruel, purposeful body draped now in the thick, loose-fitting flannel of his Dodger grays. He tended toward the back of the batter’s box, duckfooted, his legs more than shoulder width apart and the whole of him ever so slightly crowding the plate. There was an intensity to every element of that stance, an energy—or what opposing pitchers might correctly have observed as a kind of directed menace.

It was a unique batting stance, of course, as all batting stances are. But it was not excessive in any of its particulars. Nor was it unusual in the way of some other batting stances. Stan Musial, for example, stood hunched over at the top of his back, his red Cardinals cap like the bloom of a rare narcissus. Ted Williams, despite his almost clinical manner in the box, proved curiously coiled. Joe DiMaggio stood quiet, poetic even. Willie Mays seemed to be scrambling around when he was up there, all anticipation, while the way that Yogi Berra rested his bat on his shoulder leant a languidness to it all. These were a few of the other great hitters in Robinson’s time.

Yet Robinson’s batting stance may have been the most notable and influential of them all. Throughout his career—early on, certainly, as well as later, even beyond his retirement—it became the most imitated baseball batting stance in the world. In those crucial years in the middle of the twentieth century, America—relieved, proud, post-traumatized—was moving headlong past World War II and at the same time trying to lurch forward, out of the grips of its worst and grimmest sin, to find a way to bend the arc of its own moral history toward justice. The experience of the war was material both to the appetite for change and the resistance to it.

And if the struggle for justice, for sanity, was centuries old in America—beginning with the unheeded cries of the earliest abolitionists and coursing through the Civil War—this was now a new movement, a new soon-to-be definable era. The purpose and intent with which Jackie Robinson played, and with which he and his wife, Rachel, lived, were inevitably, inextricably, and manifestly entwined with the fact that he was the first. The first in baseball, America’s class-blurring milieu. He and Rachel began their journey before the modern civil rights movement found its full-throated voice. On the day that Robinson broke into the major leagues, Martin Luther King Jr. was eighteen years old and had yet to deliver his first sermon.

Robinson gave people, young people and children crucially among them, something physical to regard and emulate. God, he looked good up there. Confident, at ease. They mimicked his batting stance in Florida and Alabama and Georgia, and in California on the campus of UCLA, where Robinson had played college football, and they mimicked him on the streets of the boroughs of New York. Some had seen him in Brooklyn or in Daytona Beach or, as time went on, in any of the towns where Jackie and the Dodgers appeared on the road. Others did their best to co-opt the batting stance despite having only seen Robinson on a snippet of film or in a photograph—or not having seen him at all, but simply copying another child’s rendition. It was one thing to emulate DiMaggio or Williams or later Mays, and another still to be up there, standing just so on a sandlot or stickball court, waiting for a schoolmate’s pitch, and thinking, Oh, what it would be like to be Jackie Robinson up at bat!

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There is one other aspect of Jackie’s batting stance to consider, and for all the other elements, this is perhaps most important: the way that he looked out, from his squared, handsome, unyielding face, with its solid cheekbones and solid chin, and a jaw you couldn’t miss. His left ear was prominent and unprotected in that time before baseball adopted the batting helmet and the earflap—both of which Robinson could have used. His cap, and his alone among the hundreds of players in the game, was fortified by a lining of thick cloth and fiberglass, a minimal defense against the pitches that came toward his head, thrown with intent.

Robinson’s lips tended to purse as he awaited a pitch, his nose showed a crease in its bridge, and his eyes stared straight out with an uncompromising focus on the mound. His brows thick, his forehead furrowed. It was this very gaze—the look that meant he was ready and all business, as his teammate Ralph Branca would say many years later—that Robinson fixed on a six-foot-four-inch left-handed minor leaguer, the Jersey City Giants’ hard-throwing and square-jawed Warren Sandel, in the top of the first inning of an early afternoon game on April 18, 1946, the day Robinson, a rookie with the visiting Montreal Royals, officially began his soul-shifting, nation-bending baseball career.

MONTREAL

The land reaches northward off the base of the great continent and leans east into the North Atlantic, its shores protected here and again by outer islands, its modern shipyards secure, the whale-rich waters of the open ocean calming in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and then once more in the inner bay, where the waves finally come up against the rocky, thick thumb of risen land—the Gaspé Peninsula.

The peninsula points toward the island of Newfoundland, on the far side of the gulf, and then beyond, many, many leagues away, in a direct line to the harbors of western France. It was on the Gaspé Peninsula, in the summer of 1534, that the explorer Jacques Cartier, having set sail weeks before from the port at Saint-Malo, came ashore with his men and planted a tall cross, staking a claim literally and figuratively to the land. They called the land the Country of Canadas, deriving this from the Iroquois name.

The earliest settlers—and those who came later, in the 1600s with Samuel de Champlain, and then those who came after that—built a new life over many decades. They fished for salmon and cod, hunted game, and grew barley and beans and squash. They baked white bread and planted kitchen gardens outside their wooden homes. They traveled the Saint Lawrence River and put up trading posts along its banks. They weathered the bitter cold and the long winter nights and built canoes that traveled on ice, and they sought to deliver their Christian god to the natives. By and large, the settlers communed and coexisted—far more peaceably than did other settlers of the New World—with the Aboriginal peoples who had lived there for so many years.

In the 1700s the British arrived in earnest, and the French and the British did urgent and bloody battle for property and solvency, particularly in the Seven Years’ War and spectacularly in the battle of the Plains of Abraham, at which the British prevailed. Eventually Britain took all of Canada but, as a way to preserve some harmony for the life ahead, carved out a region where much of the French way of law and life and language and worship would continue, its heritage secure in what was then, as now, known as the Province of Quebec.

The beating heart of this province, its most populous and dynamic city, its cultural bellwether and economic pulse through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, was first known as Hochelaga, then renamed Ville-Marie, and finally—in accordance with the big bountiful hill in its midst—Mont Royal. Montreal. The waterfronts of the city thrived and expanded, and workers arrived, from Ireland and Scotland especially, to build new bridges. It was here, in Montreal, that Quebec’s first railway track was laid and the first tall buildings raised. The population swelled in the years before the Great War and swelled again afterward, and in the 1920s visitors came north to Montreal from the United States, briefly escaping Prohibition and creating a suddenly fervent nightlife where the lonely found love, and the misfits their kin, and the lights stayed on until dawn.

The Great Depression wounded and tempered the city, as it did all North American cities, until the start of World War II. Long lines of men queued for hours outside the Montreal armories, eager to enlist with the Allies, even while others abstained. Overnight the city’s factories began humming and churning and reconfiguring themselves, employing thousands of workers to build rifles, tanks, and airplanes. Civilian pilots flew arms across the Atlantic to Britain. Montreal became Canada’s arsenal, helping in great measure to aid the effort that would win the war.

The history of new people coming to Montreal, building new lives, and wanting to stay had by then created a varied and polyglot place. Immigrants had continued to arrive (and were arriving) from Britain and France, surely, but also from Hungary and Greece and Poland, and, in great numbers, from Italy. There were Catholic churches on these Montreal streets and Protestant churches on those, and synagogues here and there, and Black churches like the United Union Church, a pillar of prayer and togetherness. The people of Montreal spoke French primarily but English too (especially in matters of business and commerce), and what emerged was a world of living alongside one another. The mix of ethnicities and the distinct languages created divisions among the people even as they fostered shared perspectives as well.

It was into this city—specifically, the neighborhood of Villeray, solidly French but just a streetcar stop from the coalescing blocks of Little Italy, north of downtown and nearer to the narrow Prairies River than to the great Saint Lawrence, to a home on the Avenue de Gaspé—that in the springtime of 1946 Jackie Robinson and his buoyant, beautiful bride, Rachel, came to live.

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Jackie had his baseball gloves with him (his bats were with the team) and a few pairs of good new shoes, and Rachel counted among her tasteful wardrobe the long ermine coat that Jackie had saved up for all through their engagement and given to her as a wedding gift two months before. The air was still cool when the Robinsons arrived in Montreal that early spring, cold at night, and thin ice clung to the edges of the rivers. Yellow-billed gulls wheeling above the water could be heard in the inner streets, and on the porches and side streets of Villeray, the plantings of bunchberry and trillium had not yet begun to bloom. For the Robinsons, there was something sweet and welcome about Montreal. The city imparted a freshness and warmth despite the first seasonal chill—and it offered the promise of a respite.

Their wedding in Los Angeles seemed so long ago, even if the fact of their marriage, their grounded new love and their extraordinary new circumstances, felt deliciously young and urgent. They’d been married on a late Sunday afternoon at a great and significant Black church, the People’s Independent Church of Christ, just south of downtown Los Angeles, not far from where Rachel was raised and attended high school. As they stood at the altar, they were a dozen miles west of Pasadena, where Jackie had grown up on Pepper Street and gone to Pasadena Junior College. He did the long jump and played basketball, baseball, and football and in 1938 was named Junior College Player of the Year.

After that, Jackie attended UCLA, where he lettered in four sports—unheard of—reeling off kick returns on the football field that left defenders sprawled on the turf and earned him national headlines. On the basketball court, Jackie scored, winning Conference MVP, and in his Bruins singlet he soared, leading the NCAA with a 25-foot long jump. He would have been Olympic material (like his big brother Mack), if only the Olympics were being held. In Robinson’s day, the UCLA athletics department scheduled track meets carefully, so that Jackie could have time to finish his leaps and then swiftly slip into his baseball cleats, pull on his cap, and make his bones on the ball field as a middle infielder with uncommon speed.

Rachel was a freshman on that Westwood campus in the fall of 1940 and Jackie a senior. She knew his name, as everyone did, and she formed her preconceptions, as anyone might. They met for the first time in the student union and began the tentative forays of courtship, walking side by side and then stopping together to talk in the parking lot, the bright California sun on the spires of Kerckhoff Hall behind them. He wore crisp white shirts, and he smiled without hesitation, and she recognized in him a surety and an edge—and a decorum besides. She is lovely, he thought each time they met, and he noticed with satisfaction how quickly her shyness fell away. Rachel looked right at Jack when they spoke, and she cocked her head when she disagreed. She projected directness and honesty and, most lastingly, a warmth that Jackie knew, even in that first year, he never wanted to be without.

The guys from the old Pepper Street Gang put on suits for the wedding, and they whooped Jackie’s name as he came down the aisle. He wore a vest beneath his fitted jacket, and on his left breast a pocket square and a boutonnière. Rachel stood aglow in her old-satin ivory gown. A laced headdress. A long, sweeping train. Her photograph ran in the sports pages—a fetching close-up with her bouquet and the caption Jackie’s Choice—and nearby a photograph of Jackie signing their marriage license. A ’til death do us part contract, as one reporter put it. That picture, of Robinson on his wedding day with a pen in hand, echoed for all who saw it the photograph that had gone out a few months before, in late October of 1945, when Jackie signed up to play baseball for the Montreal Royals in the Brooklyn Dodgers farm system—an astonishing piece of history taking place, with the Royals president, Hector Racine, and the Dodgers’ general manager, Branch Rickey, looking on. Five hundred newspapers must have run that picture, and hundreds of others reported on the news.

The wedding day, adorned with a traditional white cake and many stems of white gladioli, and then a reception back at Rachel’s childhood home on Thirty-sixth Street—all under her mother’s joyful watch—took place more than five years after their first, gentle small talk by the hood of Rachel’s Ford. Theirs was a long unofficial and then official engagement. Jackie had left UCLA early, without graduating, while Rachel stayed on and earned her nursing degree. They’d stayed committed while Jackie served in the army, first at Fort Riley and then at Fort Hood. There, on an intrabase bus far from home, he had made a righteous stand, refusing to yield his seat—drawing not only ire and indignation but also a spurious court-martial before being clearly acquitted.¹ Along the way, Jackie and Rachel had weathered their own fears and mixed feelings—Rachel once returned her engagement ring to Jackie by mail—but found their way back to each other and to a renewal of their commitment. Throughout that time, the couple felt a continuing sense of anticipation and possibility. These were the years of World War II, and Jackie and Rachel were in their twenties.

After the army, Robinson played some Negro league ball for Kansas City, lighting up the ball field and riding those old backbreaking buses. That’s where the Dodgers and Branch Rickey found him, and the momentous contract was signed. Jackie then went on to ride even older, more backbreaking buses, barnstorming in the winter months with a baseball team in Venezuela, honing his unpolished skills for the challenge before him. Rachel spent her own time far from home that winter, going to New York to work as a nurse at a hospital and as a hostess at a restaurant. By then she was peering into shop windows and saving money for her trousseau.

For years, the couple had been leading such active lives, taut against the pressures and opportunities in the worlds they were entering. But now, in their brief stretch as a married couple, the sharp reality of their circumstances and of Jackie’s venture had come rushing in, taking them to places—physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually—neither of them had ever imagined. In two months, they had already experienced so much together, even more than the distance of 2,900 miles between an altar in a familiar Los Angeles church and their new life with a professional baseball team in downtown Montreal would suggest.

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They lived at number 8232 Avenue de Gaspé, occupying the second-floor apartment, a few steps up from the street. There was a short steel stairway railing painted black and a small concrete landing and an attractive outer wall built of mortared stone. Many houses on their block looked like this. The Robinsons had found the apartment on a list provided by the team, and Rachel first went to see it on her own. I can handle this, Jack, she said that morning. They were staying in a rooming house downtown during that early time in Montreal, and Jackie had to get to practice that day.

How will I be welcomed? Rachel thought now, as she stood alone on the landing, about to press the bell. She prepared for the reaction: the door opening and the first momentary double take followed by a startled look, or a despairing look. The signs, as Rachel recognized them, of someone preparing to reject her for some reason other than the one it was. But the woman who came to the door showed Rachel around with this big smile on her face, proud of the place. It’s so well organized, so neatly kept, Rachel thought, then said aloud. And when they sat down to tea, the landlady said that, if Rachel didn’t mind, she’d like to leave her linens, glassware, and china for the Robinsons to use. Rachel went back to the apartment with Jackie after practice that very day, and they signed the lease.

It was a quiet street, lined with low trees, and as the weeks and months went on, children from other neighborhoods—Verdun, maybe, LaSalle—would walk up de Gaspé from Jarry Park, hoping to catch sight of Jackie or at least point to the house and say to one another: There’s where he lives. On game days, Jackie took the streetcar to the corner of Ontario and Delorimier, to Delorimier Stadium, or Delorimier Downs, as it was also called. Later Rachel would do the same and go sit in the stands, invariably teeming stands, full of high energy and general delight. The streetcars were crowded and, after all the heavy use they’d gotten during the war, often out for repairs, so sometimes Jackie or Rachel rode the bus instead.

The crowds at the stadium that season were large from the start, the fans alight with anticipation. The Royals had won the pennant in 1945 for the first time in ten years, and the team was again rich with promise. The International League operated the highest level of minor league ball, a last stop before Brooklyn, and Branch Rickey had spent the war years stocking talent throughout the Dodgers system. Now the war was over. There was money on the streets, and the Royals home opener was set for the first day of May.

The front office felt bullish, expecting seven thousand fans or more—which would have been very strong for a weekday and above average for Opening Day. There had been professional baseball in Montreal since the 1890s, more or less, so the Royals’ budget setters had plenty of history to go on. Still, when predicting the crowd for this home opener against the Jersey City Giants, they made a gross miscalculation.

Sixteen thousand one hundred forty-four fans came into Delorimier Stadium that Wednesday afternoon. It was the largest Opening Day crowd since the day the park had opened, in 1928. The stands were full through the box seats near the infield and through much of the bench seating farther out as well. There were gamblers taking bets, and vendors selling pop, and people trading stories of the excuses they’d made for getting out of work—a funeral to attend or a fever to nurse. The mayor of Montreal, Camillien Houde, arrived to throw out the ceremonial first pitch, just as he had at that 1928 debut. Hundreds of servicemen sat among the crowd, and before the game, a military band struck up on the field. It must have been sixty degrees, with little more than an occasional breeze, when the Royals right-hander Bob Fontaine, himself just back in baseball after a long turn in the US Army Air Forces, stepped up onto the pitcher’s mound to get the game under way. It was unusual—very, very unusual, the old-timers said that day—to see this kind of excitement at Delorimier Downs. Robinson was in the lineup, batting second and playing second base.

The crowd rose when he came to bat in the first inning and stayed standing as he drew a walk, and then a few batters later came round on a single by the big Montreal first baseman, Les Burge. It was the first Royals run of the season at the stadium. They rose again in the sixth, when Robinson pulled a single into left field. Between innings, Mayor Houde sought out Robinson, and they posed for a photograph. The happy fans saw Robinson start two double plays on that cloudless afternoon—Robinson to shortstop Stan Breard to Burge—and the Royals rolled out ahead and stayed there, winning 12–9.

The team was home for two straight weeks, and Robinson, it seemed, was in the middle of almost everything. A double and a stolen base to help beat the Giants again a couple of days later. Two hits in a game against the Newark Bears. Two more hits, a stolen base, and a run knocked in to lead a win over the Orioles. Robinson was hardly the only star. The center fielder Marvin Rabbit Rackley might have been the fastest player in the league; the left fielder Tommy Tatum kept driving in the runs that won the game; Les Burge clouted home runs over the right field fence; the third baseman Al Campanis won a game with a grand slam. And yet, Robinson was the player we were there to see, recalls Mitzi Melnick. She was fifteen years old in 1946, and lived over by Mont Royal, maybe a half hour’s travel to Delorimier Downs. It was part of Melnick’s general approach to life that spring that, whenever she could, she was going to find ways to slip out of Baron Byng High School a little early and take the streetcar to the game. On Ladies’ Days, Mitzi and her friends got in free. He got a standing ovation every time he got a hit, Melnick says. He just brought such excitement, the way that he played. You would be watching him, and you would also be looking around and connecting with the other people there with you, like, ‘Isn’t this great.’

Robinson was not so seasoned as his teammates, who had, to a man, played many more games of professional ball than he. Apart from college, Robinson had experienced only the freewheeling half season in the Negro American League and a stint in Venezuela. In the field, he would thrill the Montreal fans one day—a lunge to one side, a running catch into short right field—but would muff a simple ground ball or make a wild throw the next. He was at times out of position, or forgot to go into the outfield and take the relay throw for a play at home plate. Up at bat he could be out-crafted by a pitcher with a plan, and he often swung at pitches he wished he had not swung at. That season in Montreal, Robinson, at twenty-seven years old, was a marvelous young player, crash-learning the professional game.

Robinson was also raw as a base runner—although on this front, his skill was without peer in the league. He sent opposing teams into fits of frenzy, a reporter noted of the way Robinson worked his leads off every base. He can stop and start with unbelievable suddenness. On tag plays, Robinson eluded fielders in ways that took even umpires by surprise. During those opening weeks of the season, Lew Hayman, a founder of Montreal’s new Big Four football club, the Alouettes, let it be known that come autumn, he’d like to hire Robinson to play for his team too.²

By the end of that first home stand in Montreal, the Royals had won 9 of 10 games. They were leading the International League with a record of 16–8. Robinson, playing every day, was batting .326. He had stolen 13 bases and scored 26 runs, better than a run a game. He was, as he would later confide, still finding his way in the glare, in the day-after-day of it all, but he now knew without question that he could put on his glove and knot his cleats and really play with these guys. This league would not, on any merits of his ability, contain

Reviews for True

[lindapanzo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The story of baseball great Jackie Robinson and his rise to the major leagues, breaking baseball's color barrier, is an often told story. However, none of those other books have been like this one.Instead of writing a traditional baseball bio, the author focuses on four pivotal years in Robinson's life and baseball career: the year he first played in the minors for the Montreal Royals (1946); the season he won the MVP award while playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers (1949); his final season in the majors (1956); and his last year of life (1972).By focusing on these four critical years, the author is able to take a deep dive and present new information I've not seen before (and I have read other Jackie Robinson books). Especially fascinating was his look at Robinson's post-baseball life. I greatly enjoyed the information from players, fans, and others "who were there" and could provide a fuller look at his career and life outside the game.Highly recommended to baseball fans and others who want to learn more about this great man!!(I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via Net Galley, in exchange for a fair and honest review.)